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Ray LaMontagne Rants At Talkers & Storms Off Stage In Grand Rapids

Singer-songwriter Ray
LaMontagne brought his Supernova Summer Tour to Frederik Meijer Gardens in
Grand Rapids, MI last night, where he went on a expletive-filled tirade against talkers
within the capacity
crowd and even walked off stage according to
MLive.com.

MLive reports LaMontage's expletive-filled diatribe to those talking in the front row
included several F-bombs and the phrase, “Why don’t you go the (expletive) home and talk?”
The report goes on to say that after Ray dropped his guitar and headed off-stage, security
and members of LaMontagne's crew talked to the audience members who were the target of the
singer-songwriter's anger and shortly thereafter they left leading to cheers from some of
those in the crowd. Ray returned to the stage after a delay of five minutes and didn't say
anything about the incident during the remainder of his performance.

While Ray LaMontagne hasn't mentioned anything on his social feeds about what went down
last night, a number of audience members took to Facebook
and Twitter to voice their
displeasure. We can certainly understand how frustrating it must be for a performer to
deal with talkative audience members, but we do feel for those who were expecting a
family-friendly concert and had to listen to an expletive-filled rant. MLive notes one
particular response on Facebook: “This was the first concert I ever took my son to, he's
only 6. I took him because I love the music but also because Ray seems
like a pretty chill guy. So thanks for the cussing and the child like tantrum Ray. Thanks
for ruining my child's first ever concert with unnecessary f-bombs.”

UPDATE 12:30 p.m. PT: MLive.com spoke with
one of the supposedly chatty fans at last night's show - 30-year-old Shawn Virgo.
Virgo told the website that, "My fiancé and I had our conversation during one of the
songs. It was mere whispers in the ear about how excited we were for the upcoming wedding,
how excited to hear the song, and that it would be our first dance." The concertgoer
denied he had been warned to keep it down by LaMontagne earlier in the performance, "That
is not accurate. If he did do that, it was to somebody else as we did nothing to interrupt
his show. We didn’t do anything that would warrant that. There had to have been some
confusion with Ray and what he was offended by."

Virgo feels the venue staff handled the situation well, but he felt he was being asked to
leave the concert. "We didn't want to stay because we felt like there might be more
incidents if we did but I do recall that it was made very clear to me by one of the
security guards that we needed to leave the venue. We weren’t there to be disruptive, we
were there to have a good time and that’s exactly what we were having until this
happened," the concertgoer told MLive. Virgo added, "I wish it could have been handled
differently without him storming off stage and using foul language in front of families.
If we truly were being bothersome, I’d like Ray to know what was being said and it really
was just whispers about how excited we were to have his song be part of our wedding. I
think he would have handled it differently if he would’ve known what was being talked
about. We’re there to see him and excited to see him and that was the only thing we wanted
to do, not upset him."